Lecture by Chantal Mouffe, Globalization and Cultural differentiation seminar.
March 19-20, 1999, MACBA'-CCCB

For a politics of democratic identity

In recent decades, the willingness to rely on categories like "human nature", "universal reason" and "rational autonomous subject" has increasingly been put into question. From diverse standpoints, very different thinkers have criticized the idea of a universal human nature, of a universal canon of rationality through which that nature could be known, as well as the possibility of a universal truth. Such a critique of rationalism and universalism, which is sometimes referred to as "post-modern", is seen by authors like Jurgen Habermas as a threat to the modern democratic ideal. They affirm that there is a necessary link between the democratic project of the Enlightenment and its epistemological approach and that, as a consequence, to find fault with rationalism and universalism means undermining the very basis of democracy. This explains the hostility of Habermas and his followers towards the different forms of post-Marxism, post-structuralism and post-modernism.

I am going to take issue with such a thesis and argue that it is only by drawing all the implications of the critique of essentialism — which constitutes the point of convergence of all the so-called "posties" — that it is possible to grasp the nature of the political and to reformulate and radicalize the democratic project of the Enlightenment. I believe that it is urgent to realize that the universalist and rationalist framework in which that project was formulated has today become as obstacle to an adequate understanding of the present stage of democratic politics. Such a framework should be discarded and this can be done without having to abandon the political aspect of the Enlightenment which is represented by the democratic revolution.

We should, on this subject, follow the lead of Hans Blumenberg who in his book, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, distinguishes two different logics in the Enlightenment, one of "self-assertion" (political) and one of "self-grounding" (epistemological). According to him, those two logics have been articulated historically but there is no necessary relation between them and they can perfectly be separated. It is therefore possible to discriminate between what is truly modern — the idea of "self-assertion" — and what is merely a "reoccupation" of a medieval position, i.e. an attempt to give a modern answer to a premodern question. In Blumenberg’s view, rationalism is not something essential to the idea of self-assertion but a residue from the absolutist medieval problematic. This illusion of providing itself with its own foundations which accompanied the labour of liberation from theology should now be abandoned and modern reason should acknowledge its limits. Indeed, it is only when it comes to term with pluralism and accepts the impossibility of total control and final harmony that modern reason frees itself from its premodern heritage.

This approach reveals the inadequacy of the term "post-modernity" when it is used to refer to a completely different historical period that would signify a break with modernity. When we realize that rationalism and abstract universalism, far from being constitutive of modern reason were in fact reoccuptions of premodern position, it becomes clear that to put them into question does not imply a rejection of modernity but a coming to terms with the potentialities that were inscribed in it since the beginning. It also help us to understand why the critique of the epistemological aspect of the Enlightenment does not put its political aspect of self-assertion into question but, on the contrary, can help to strengthen the democratic project.

The critique of essentialism.
One of the fundamental advance of what I have called the critique of essentialism has been the break with the category of the subject as a rational transparent entity which could convey a homogeneous meaning on the total field of her conduct by being the source of her actions. Psychoanalysis has shown that, far from being organized around the transparency of an ego, personality is structured in a number of levels which lie outside the consciousness and rationality of the agents. It has therefore discredited the idea of the necessarily unified character of the subject. Freud’s central claim is that the human mind is necessarily subject to division between two systems, one of which is not and cannot be conscious. The self-mastery of the subject, a central theme of modern philosophy, is precisely what he argues can never be reached. Following Freud and expanding his insight, Lacan has shown the plurality of registers — the Symbolic, the Real and the Imaginary — that penetrate any identity, and the place of the subject as the place of the lack which, though represented within the structure, is the empty place that at the same time subverts and is the condition of the constitution of any identity. The history of the subject is the history of her identifications and there is no concealed identity to be rescued beyond the latter. There is thus a double movement. On the one hand, a movement of decentering which prevents the fixation of a set of positions around a preconstituted point. On the other hand, and as a result of this essential non-fixity, the opposite movement: the institution of nodal points, partial fixations which limit the flux of the signified under the signifier. But the dialectics of non-fixity/fixation is possible only because fixity is not pregiven, because no center of subjectivity precedes the subject’s identifications.

I think that it is important to stress that such a critique of essential identities is not limited to a certain current in French theory but is found in the most important philosophies of the twentieth century. For instance, in the philosophy of language of the later Wittgenstein, we also find a critique of the rationalist conception of the subject that indicates that the latter cannot be the source of linguistic meanings since it is through participation in different languages games that the world is disclosed to us. We encounter the same idea in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics in the thesis that there exists a fundamental unity between thought, language and the world, and that it is within language that the horizon of our present is constituted. A similar critique of the centrality of the subject in modern metaphysics and of its unitary character can be found in different forms in several other authors and this allow us to affirm that, far from being limited to post-structuralism or post-modernism, the critique of essentialism constitutes the point of convergence of the most important contemporary philosophical currents.

Anti-essentialism and politics
In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy we have attempted to draw the consequences of this critique of essentialism for a radical conception of democracy by articulating some of its insights with the gramscian conception of hegemony. This led us to put the question of power and antagonism and their ineradicable character at the center of our approach. One of the main thesis of the book is that social objectivity is constituted through acts of power. This means that any social objectivity is ultimately political and that it has to show the traces of exclusion which governs its constitution: what following Derrida, we have called its "constitutive outside". But, if an object has inscribed in its very being something other than itself: if as a result, everything is constructed as difference, its being cannot be conceived as pure "presence" or "objectivity". This indicates that the logics of the constitution of the social is incompatible with the objectivism and essentialism dominant in social sciences and liberal thought.

The point of convergence -or rather mutual collapse- between objectivity and power is what we have called "hegemony". This way of posing the problem indicates that power should not be conceived as an external relation taking place between two pre-constituted identities, but rather as constituting the identities themselves. This is really decisive. Because if the "constitutive outside" is present within the inside as its always real possibility, in that case the inside itself becomes a purely contingent and reversible arrangement (in other words, the hegemonic arrangement cannot claim any other source of validity than the power basis on which it is grounded). The structure of mere possibility of any objective order, which is revealed by its mere hegemonic nature is shown in the forms assumed by the subversion of the sign (i.e. of the relation signifier/signified). For instance, the signifier "democracy" is very different when fixed to a certain signified in a discourse that articulates it to "anti-communism" and when it is fixed to another signified in a discourse that makes it part of the total meaning of antifascism. As there is no common ground between those conflicting articulations, there is no way of subsuming them under a deeper objectivity which would reveal its true and deeper essence. This explains the constitutive and irreducible character of antagonism.

The consequences of those thesis for politics are far-reaching. For instance, according to such a perspective, political practice in a democratic society does not consist in defending the rights of preconstituted identities, but rather in constituting those identities themselves in a precarious and always vulnerable terrain. Such an approach also involves a displacement of the traditional relations between "democracy" and "power". For a traditional socialist conception, the more democratic a society is, the less power would be constitutive of social relations. But if we accept that relations of power are constitutive of the social, then the main question of democratic politics is not how to eliminate power but how to constitute forms of power that are compatible with democratic values. To acknowledge the existence of relations of power and the need to transform them while renouncing the illusion that we could free ourselves completely from power, this is what is specifics to the project of "radical and plural democracy" that we are advocating.

Another distinct character of our approach concerns the question of the de-universalization of political subjects. We try to break with all forms of essentialism. Not only the essentialism which penetrates to a large extent the basic categories of modern sociology and liberal thought and according to which every social identity is perfectly defined in the historical process of the unfolding of being; but also with its diametrical opposite: a certain type of extreme post-modern fragmentation of the social which refuses to give the fragments any kind of relational identity. Such a view leaves us with a multiplicity of identities without any common denominator and makes it impossible to distinguish between differences that exist but should not exist and differences that do not exist but should exist. In other words, by putting an exclusive emphasis on heterogeneity and incommensurability, it impedes us to recognize how certain differences are constructed as relations of subordination and should therefore be challenged by a radical democratic politics.

Democracy and Identity
After having given a brief outline of the main tenets of our anti-essentialist approach and of its general implications for politics, I now would like to address some specific problems concerning the construction of democratic identities. I am going to examine how such a question can be formulated within the framework which breaks with the traditional rationalist liberal problematic and that incorporates some crucial insights of the critique of essentialism. One of the main problem with the liberal framework is that it reduces politics to the calcul of interests. Individuals are presented as rational actors moved by the search for the maximization of their self-interest. That is, they are seen as acting in the field of politics in a basically instrumentalist way. Politics is conceived through a model elaborated to study economics, as a market concerned with the allocation of resources, where compromises are reached among interests defined independently of their political articulation. Other liberals, those who rebel against this model and who want to create a link between politics and morality believe that it is possible to create a rational and universal consensus by means of free discussion. They believe that by relegating disruptive issues to the private sphere, a rational agreement on principles should be enough to administer the pluralism of modern societies. For both type of liberals, everything that has to do with passions, with antagonisms, everything that can lead to violence is seen as archaic and irrational: as residues of a bygone age where the "sweet commerce" had not yet established the preeminence of interest over passions.

But this attempt to annihilate the political is doomed to failure because it cannot be domesticated in this way. As was pointed out by Carl Schmitt, the political can derive its energy from the most diverse sources and emerge out of many different social relations: religious, moral, economic, ethnic or other. The political has to do with the dimension of antagonism which is present in social relations, with the ever present possibility of a "us" / "them" relation to be constructed in terms of "friend" / "enemy". To deny this dimension of antagonism does not make it disappear, it only leads to impotence in recognizing its different manifestations and in dealing with them. This is why a democratic approach needs to come to terms with the ineradicable character of antagonism. One of its main task is to envisage how it is possible to defuse the tendencies to exclusion which are present in all construction of collective identities.
To clarify the perspective that I am putting forward, I propose to distinguish between "the political" and "politics". By "the political", I refer to the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in all human society, antagonism that, as I said, can take many different forms and can emerge in diverse social relations. "Politics" on the other side refers to the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence in conditions which are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of "the political". This view which attempts to keep together the two meanings of "polemos" and "polis" from where the idea of politics comes from is, I believe, crucial if we want to be able to protect and consolidate democracy.

In examining this question the concept of the "constitutive outside" to which I have referred earlier is particularly helpful. As elaborated by Derrida, its aim is to highlight the fact that the creation of an identity implies the establishment of a difference, difference which is often constructed on the basis of a hierarchy: for example between form and matter, black and white, man and woman, etc. Once we have understood that every identity is relational and that the affirmation of a difference is a precondition for the existence of any identity, i.e. the perception of something "other" than it which will constitute its "exterior", then we can begin to understand why such a relation may always become the breeding ground for antagonism. Indeed, when it comes to the creation of a collective identity, basically the creation of an "us" by the demarcation of a "them", there is always the possibility of that "us" and "them" relationship becoming one of "friend and enemy", i.e. to become antagonistic. This happens when the "other", who up until now has been considered simply as different, starts to be perceived as someone who puts in question our identity and threatens our existence. From that moment on, any form of "us and them" relationship, whether it be religious, ethnic, economic or other, becomes political.

It is only when we acknowledge this dimension of "the political" and understand that "politics" consists in domesticating hostility and in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations, that we can pose the fundamental question for democratic politics. This question, pace the rationalists, is not how to arrive at a rational consensus reached without exclusion, or in other words it is not how to establish an "us" which would not have a corresponding "them". This is impossible because there cannot exist an "us" without a "them". What is at stake is how to establish this "us"/"them" discrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy.

In the realm of politics, this presupposes that the "other" is no longer seen as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an "adversary", i.e. somebody with whose ideas we are going to struggle but whose right to defend those ideas we will not put into question. We could say that the aim of democratic politics is transform an "antagonism" into an "agonism". The prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions nor to relegate them to the private sphere in order to render rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions in a way that promotes democratic designs. Far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence.

Modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order. Breaking with the symbolic representation of society as an organic body — which is characteristic of the holist mode of social organization — a democratic society makes room for the expression of conflicting interests and values. For that reason pluralist democracy demands not only consensus on a set of common political principles but also the presence of dissent and institutions through which such divisions can be manifested. This is why its survival depends on collective identities forming around clearly differentiated positions, as well as on the possibility of choosing between real alternatives. The blurring of political frontiers between right and left, for instance, impedes the creation of democratic political identities and fuel disenchantment with political participation. This prepares the ground for various forms of populist politics articulated around nationalist, religious or ethnic issues. When the agonistic dynamic of the pluralist system is hindered because of a lack of democratic identities which one could identify, there is a risk that this will multiply confrontations over essentialist identities and non-negotiable moral values.

Once it is acknowledged that any identity is relational and defined in terms of difference, how can we defuse the possibility of exclusion that it entails? Here again the notion of the "constitutive outside" can help us. By stressing the fact the outside is constitutive, it reveals the impossibility of drawing an absolute distinction between interior and exterior. The existence of the other becomes condition of possibility of my identity since, without the other, I could not have an identity. Therefore every identity is irremediably destabilized by its exterior and the interior appears as something always contingent. This questions every essentialist conception of identity and forecloses every attempt to conclusively define identity or objectivity. Inasmuch as objectivity always depends on an absent otherness, it is always necessarily echoed and contaminated by this otherness. Identity cannot, therefore, belong to one person alone, and no-one belongs to a single identity. We may go further, and argue that not only there are no "natural" and "original" identities, since every identity is the result of a constituting process, but that this process itself must be seen as one of permanent hybridization and nomadization. Identity is, in effect, the result of a multitude of interactions which take place inside a space the outlines of which are not clearly defined. Numerous feminist studies or researches inspired by the "post-colonial" perspective have shown that this process is always one of "overdetermination", which establishes highly intricate links between the many forms of identity and a complex network of differences. For an appropriate definition of identity, we need to take into account both the multiplicity of discourses and the power structure which affects it, as well as the complex dynamic of complicity and resistance which underlines the practices in which this identity is implicated. Instead of seeing the different forms of identity as allegiances to a place or as a property, we ought to realize that they are what is at stake in any power struggle.

What we commonly call "cultural identity" is both the scene and the object of political struggles. The social existence of a group needs such conflict. It is one of the principal areas in which hegemony is exercised, because the definition of the cultural identity of a group, by reference to a specific system of contingent and particular social relations, plays a major role in the creation of "hegemonic nodal points". These partially define the meaning of a "signifying chain" allowing us to control the stream of signifiers, and temporarily to control the discursive field.

Concerning the question of "national" identities — so crucial again today — the perspective based on hegemony and articulation allows us to come to grips with the idea of the national, to grasp the importance of that type of identity, instead of rejecting it in the name of anti-essentialism or as part of a defense of abstract universalism. It is very dangerous to ignore the strong libidinal investment that can be mobilized by the signifier "nation" and it is futile to hope that all national identities could be replaced by so-called "post-conventional" identities. The struggle against the exclusive type of ethnic nationalism can only be carried out by articulating another type of nationalism, a "civic" nationalism expressing allegiance to the values specific of the democratic tradition and the forms of life that are constitutive of it.

Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, I do not believe that — to take the case of Europe, for instance — the solution is the creation of a "European" identity, conceived as a homogeneous identity which could replace all other identifications and allegiances. But if we envisage it in terms of "aporia", of a "double genitive" as suggested by Derrida in The Other Heading, then the notion of a European identity could be the catalyst for a promising process, not unlike what Merleau-Ponty called "lateral universalism", which implies that the universal lies at the very heart of specificities and differences, and that it is inscribed in respect for diversity. Indeed, if we conceive this European identity as a "difference to oneself", then we are envisaging an identity which can accommodate otherness, which demonstrates the porosity of its frontiers and opens up towards that exterior which makes it possible. By accepting that only hybridity creates us as separate entities, it affirms and upholds the nomadic character of every identity.

I submit that, by resisting the ever present temptation to construct identity in terms of exclusion, and by recognizing that identities comprise a multiplicity of elements, and that they are dependent and interdependent, a democratic politics informed by an anti-essentialist approach can defuse the potential for violence that exists in every construction of collective identities and create the conditions for a truly "agonistic" pluralism. Such a pluralism is anchored in the recognition of the multiplicity within oneself and of the contradictory positions that this multiplicity entails. Its acceptance of the other does not merely consists in tolerating differences, but in positively celebrating them because it acknowledges that, without alterity and otherness, no identity could ever assert itself. It is also a pluralism that valorizes diversity and dissensus, recognizing in them the very condition of possibility of a striving democratic life.

Chantal Mouffe